Katrina and living on the edge

August 30, 2005

Lots of people have New Orleans stories to tell (and some people, New Orleans stories they will never tell) about what happens when all that heat and all that passion and all that water somehow get mixed up with bourbon and jazz. Talk about dangerous. It's enough to make you forget, just for an evening, that right above you sits water, the Mississippi, Lake Pontchartrain, and out there a bit, the Gulf, all of it as determined as it can be to come rushing in.

In the bleary morning, a clarifying cafe au lait and a beignet at Cafe du Monde remind you that the enemy throbbing in your head is not as threatening as the enemy that waits just over there, where land yields to water, save for a levee. They bury the dead above ground and party in a furious way in New Orleans, perhaps aware that the lovely city's position on the map is tenuous.

Nature would cover her with water and silt and make her disappear in an instant, if only nature could. She would enter through the back door, pushing Gulf water into Lake Pontchartrain, which would overflow its levees.

The levees and the pumps fight that battle all the time, and sometimes, even that isn't enough.

Nature came close to winning the struggle Monday.

Hurricane Katrina, with 145 m.p.h. winds driving a 15-foot storm surge, bounced off the east side of the city and thrashed the coast from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, leaving flooding and widespread devastation in her wake. People headed inland by the hundreds of thousands after warnings that this one could be bad, indeed, could be the one that changed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast forever.

Like all big storms, this one diminished in stature over land, unleashing reservoirs of rain and wind and spinning off tornadoes all over the southeast. Who knows what the toll will be by the time it's over? A prudent President Bush called for prayer, and he was right. That's about all anyone can do early on in a storm of this size.

Perhaps the people of New Orleans and all those who live along the rest of the Gulf Coast can take some solace in the thoughts of the writer A.J. Liebling, who once suggested the boldest, the bravest of people were drawn over decades of migration toward the sea, not to safe spots inland.